Hacker News: mmartinson

New comment by mmartinson in "On second thought, just throw plastic away"

mmartinson — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 15:28:00 +0000

The problem is that it frequently detours from interesting discussions points to do things like dump on Greenpeace. Not interesting. Being elsewhere on the political spectrum doesn’t discount the interesting points, it just injects too many wacky ideas to make it possible to engage with. Ratio of density between interesting points and fever swamp ranting too low. Trash rag.

New comment by mmartinson in "Doing what you love when the money won’t follow"

mmartinson — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:19:50 +0000

Y'all should enjoy drawing pictures and making mediocre music without worrying about how that relates to success or money. Your career is important, but it's only one part of a good life. Things that are enjoyable but unproductive often have a way of building skills and character that can later help you in unexpected ways.

New comment by mmartinson in "The most-regretted (and lowest-paying) college majors"

mmartinson — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 16:19:01 +0000

> Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. The critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.

I've experienced this exactly. I have a philosophy degree. I floundered a bit career-wise post undergrad, self-studied for a practical entry vector into a programming job, and 8 years later have a super rewarding career as a software engineer. I felt my humanities undergrad, especially the critical thinking and writing skills I developed, have helped me advance much more quickly.

If I were to change anything, I would have liked to do a CS minor.

New comment by mmartinson in "Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?"

mmartinson — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:20:35 +0000

> But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.

This is very, very far from my experience, having worked extensively with both of these particular examples.

At my current job I deep dive into a lot of years old, kinda sketchy Elixir code, and it's almost always less effort to learn/fix something than I've found in other languages, especially other dynamic languages. Except when macros are overused.

New comment by mmartinson in "Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?"

mmartinson — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:09:56 +0000

> Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving.

I'm not sure becoming a high paying/good software engineer are necessarily relevant to the stated goals of the OP's question. There can be inherent reward in working with a set of less popular, well crafted tools. Yes you might grow faster as a professional by working with a group of industry best JS programmers, but working with a small team building in Elixir and moving fast without ever hitting a NaN can be a pretty rewarding experience.

New comment by mmartinson in "Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?"

mmartinson — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 15:02:17 +0000

It's valuable to consider the opportunity cost of this compared to a deepened knowledge of an already productive tool

New comment by mmartinson in "Internet drama in Canada"

mmartinson — Fri, 27 May 2022 15:49:41 +0000

Out of curiosity for someone who is Canadian, what’s the assumed pull? Historically it would be income and career opportunities, but the tide has turned on that quite significantly in the last 5-10 years. Outside of that, it’s safe, clean, people are friendly, there are nice things. With a middle of the road tech salary the price of internet is a non concern.

That said, Canadian politics and crony capitalism are a grind sometimes, but looking over the fence it’s not totally obvious that other systems aren’t trading one set of intractable problems for another.

New comment by mmartinson in "Please stop calling it “magic” (2017)"

mmartinson — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:58:49 +0000

Nothing makes me long for boilerplate as much as seeing Ruby code with heavy use of metaprogramming.

New comment by mmartinson in "Erlang/OTP Profiling: Fprof"

mmartinson — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 16:44:41 +0000

fprof, recon trace, observer have proved to be the holy trifecta for me for debugging challenging production issues. I miss these deeply when working in other languages.

New comment by mmartinson in "Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?"

mmartinson — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 16:56:56 +0000

Having worked with both ActiveRecord and Ecto, Ecto is consistently easier to reason about and change than AR. It feels closer to the DB without compromising composability, and better avoids surprises. Ecto is IMO one of the killer features of the Elixir ecosystem that is undercelebrated compared to the neat things that are rarely used.

New comment by mmartinson in "Three Ways to Debug Code in Elixir"

mmartinson — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 17:49:10 +0000

Recon trace is a worthwhile addition. I've used it for some hairy production bugs that don't reproduce locally. Allows you to unobtrusively instrument a running system and echo back function calls with their params, including process targeting if needed.

There are a number of powerful tools for BEAM runtime tracing. I prefer this one because the API is simple enough to commit to memory, and it protects against some common foot guns.

https://ferd.github.io/recon/recon_trace.html

New comment by mmartinson in "There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada"

mmartinson — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 21:13:45 +0000

More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.

New comment by mmartinson in "Tips for Interviewing over Zoom"

mmartinson — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 16:58:36 +0000

I interview a lot of candidates over zoom for remote positions. For me, few to none of the specific details matter. What's important is if the candidate demonstrates that they've had the empathy and self awareness to consider how their call setup affects others' ability to communicate with them. All the suggestions in the linked article seem painfully obvious for anyone working in 2021.

I actually prefer when the candidate has some sort of uncontrollable distraction that comes up during the interview. It provides a good opportunity to see how they handle the real world challenges of remote work. For anyone not sure how to handle this, interrupting with "excuse me, I'm going to mute for 20 seconds while garbage truck passes" is completely reasonable, even in a fairly formal situation.

New comment by mmartinson in "Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds"

mmartinson — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 17:57:49 +0000

I’ve always found exercise to be a motivator for getting diet under control. Periods of low exercise correlates with bad eating. Building back the routine makes shifting diet much easier.

New comment by mmartinson in "How to Compose Queries in Ecto (2019)"

mmartinson — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 14:55:54 +0000

Ecto is a real unsung here of the Elixir ecosystem. It's a joy to build queries and changesets through composable data structures, and to know exactly when they're going to be executed against the DB. I miss it deeply whenever I'm working with a different ORM.

If anyone is curios and wants to get a high level overview, this conference talk by Darin Wilson provides a helpful intro to the patterns Ecto uses that differ from other popular ORMs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQxopjai0CU

New comment by mmartinson in "Discord outage postmortem"

mmartinson — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 22:14:23 +0000

The sort of crash looping that took down their nodes is one of the parts of OTP that I’ve found to be both quite unintuitive and dangerous, for exactly the reasons described. There are controls for max retry attempts within a time window, but no obvious way from what I can tell to require a supervisor to halt rather than propagate a crash loop in a way that is easily auditable. This has caused me bad failures as well, and I’d be curious to hear what others are doing here. It’s not that it’s a hrs problem to solve, but that it’s an easy thing to overlook.

New comment by mmartinson in "U.S. immigration policy has been a boon for the tech industry in Canada"

mmartinson — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 16:12:30 +0000

For anyone not from Ontario, "4 L bag of 1%" must sound pretty funny.

New comment by mmartinson in "Nuclear fusion startup raises $100M to design and build a demo power plant"

mmartinson — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 22:42:10 +0000

Which island is it?

New comment by mmartinson in "Tesla Cybertruck"

mmartinson — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 20:14:23 +0000

I find this looks goofy, but other than the lack of physical buttons inside, this is a dream vehicle for me. Most weekends I want to drive 4 people + 4 mountain bikes a 120 mile round trip including fast highway and rough mountain roads.

New comment by mmartinson in "Tesla Cybertruck"

mmartinson — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 20:08:30 +0000

Around where I live the preferred term is "cidiot". I find it to be refreshingly creative.